Two items in the April 23, 2007 Wall Street Journal that, taken together, suggest the United States' slippage as unipolar world power:
First, the price of West Texas crude oil -- long a standard for gauging the price of oil, has drifted further and further from the price of other, similar, grades of crude oil, leading some "market participants", quoted by reporter Ann Davis, to call West Texas crude "a broken benchmark". As a standard, traders used contracts for the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) to hedge against overall fluctuations in oil prices. If that price no longer reflects world prices (e.g., oil of comparable grade from the North Sea, or Middle East oil), then its value as a hedging device wanes. Part of the price disparity is due to temporary factors that have created a glut of oil at the delivery point used to measure the oil price -- a terminal in Cushing, Oklahoma -- which, over time, should be corrected, and the price come closer to the overall world price. But Middle East production is some 20 times West Texas production (per the article, "West Texas Oil Falters in Its Role As a Benchmark"), and so the West Texas oil trading contracts do have the same meaning as a proposed new benchmark for Middle East oil, to be traded on the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (as opposed to the New York Mercantile Exchange, or NYMEX, where the WTI contracts are traded). It should be noted that NYMEX is part of the joint venture that has formed the Dubai exchange.
Second, the article "An Unrelated Story: U.S., Global Stock Markets Increasingly Take Separate Paths" describes how the U.S. stock indexes have been trailing important stock indexes in other markets. The Dow Jones World Index is up 8.5% this year, while the S&P 500 is up "only" 3.9%. This de-coupling would suggest that the U.S. economy is no longer the big dog, with the other national economies following in tandem. Instead, these other national economies are beginning to show their independence. Half of the world's stock market capitalization -- the value of the shares traded on those markets -- is overseas now, according to one fund manager quoted in the article.
Perhaps a better indicator is the value of the U.S. dollar, which according to the April 28 WSJ, is at its lowest point ever against the Euro. Compared with the Federal Reserves Trade-Weighted Index, the dollar is at its lowest point since it created the index in 1973 (although not as low as it was in 2004 if inflation is taken into account).
jd
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Biofuels
George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist, has written a powerful indictment of the disasters that occur when environmental "solutions" are forced through the sieve of our capitalist economy. His March 27 column, "If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuel" catalogs the destruction that is taking place as venture capitalists, hedge funds, agribusiness, and their paid lap-dogs in government push fuels derived from plants as the solution to what? Not global warming, although ethanol and bio-diesel may have a net lighter impact (although Monbiot cites some figures that suggest that some biofuels will contribute more to climate change than our friend oil). No, the driving force is our heavy consumption of (or as George Bush says, "addiction to") oil.
The economic and environmental dislocation following the investment in plant-based fuels has occurred rapidly, and highlights the interconnections within the economy. Nothing can happen without disturbing other things. The overall price of energy -- in particular oil -- rises, making other fuel sources more economical. As ethanol plants sprout across the Midwest, the demand for corn rises, causing corn prices to nearly double. But now, the ethanol distilleries are competing with food producers, so the price of corn-based foods -- everything from tortillas to pork to soda pop -- is affected. In the U.S., the grocery price increases may be diffused for a while, but in countries like Mexico, where tortillas are a food staple, people have rioted in protest of the increases.
Palm trees are another source of biofuel, where the oil is used to make bio-diesel. The demand for palm oil has resulted in the clearing of forests and replacement with palm tree plantations, to such an extent that it is now considered the biggest source of deforestation in southeast Asia. Monbiot cites figures that say that palm oil plantations are destroying 0.7 percent of the Malaysian rainforest each year; he cites a UN report that says that 98 percent of the Indonesian rainforest will be gone or degraded by 2022 -- fifteen years from now. The rainforest in Brazil is also under pressure from fuel plantations. In the U.S., farmers now have an incentive to bring fallow or marginal land (marginal in agricultural terms) into production -- i.e., habitat destruction.
(This is another example of the "ecosystem of globalization" -- the transformation of wild or natural or diversely complex habitats into managed plantations. We still have an environment, but instead of the rich mix of plants and animals in, say, the Malaysian rainforest, we will have rows and rows of monoculture.)
The solution, voiced from many quarters, is not finding new sources of fuel, but finding ways to reduce demand, through more efficient vehicles, conservation, a shift in consciousness. Biofuels represent a great capitalism solution to the peak oil problem -- at first glance everyone has their cake and can eat it too -- but it is quickly becoming apparent that biofuels are no magic fix. If anything, they are clarifying the limits of being able to solve the environmental crises within the context of capitalism.
jd
The economic and environmental dislocation following the investment in plant-based fuels has occurred rapidly, and highlights the interconnections within the economy. Nothing can happen without disturbing other things. The overall price of energy -- in particular oil -- rises, making other fuel sources more economical. As ethanol plants sprout across the Midwest, the demand for corn rises, causing corn prices to nearly double. But now, the ethanol distilleries are competing with food producers, so the price of corn-based foods -- everything from tortillas to pork to soda pop -- is affected. In the U.S., the grocery price increases may be diffused for a while, but in countries like Mexico, where tortillas are a food staple, people have rioted in protest of the increases.
Palm trees are another source of biofuel, where the oil is used to make bio-diesel. The demand for palm oil has resulted in the clearing of forests and replacement with palm tree plantations, to such an extent that it is now considered the biggest source of deforestation in southeast Asia. Monbiot cites figures that say that palm oil plantations are destroying 0.7 percent of the Malaysian rainforest each year; he cites a UN report that says that 98 percent of the Indonesian rainforest will be gone or degraded by 2022 -- fifteen years from now. The rainforest in Brazil is also under pressure from fuel plantations. In the U.S., farmers now have an incentive to bring fallow or marginal land (marginal in agricultural terms) into production -- i.e., habitat destruction.
(This is another example of the "ecosystem of globalization" -- the transformation of wild or natural or diversely complex habitats into managed plantations. We still have an environment, but instead of the rich mix of plants and animals in, say, the Malaysian rainforest, we will have rows and rows of monoculture.)
The solution, voiced from many quarters, is not finding new sources of fuel, but finding ways to reduce demand, through more efficient vehicles, conservation, a shift in consciousness. Biofuels represent a great capitalism solution to the peak oil problem -- at first glance everyone has their cake and can eat it too -- but it is quickly becoming apparent that biofuels are no magic fix. If anything, they are clarifying the limits of being able to solve the environmental crises within the context of capitalism.
jd
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Environmental discourse
I have this sense about environmental discourse that treats capitalism as antagonistic to the environment, as "the enemy of nature". Well the "environment" and "nature" are two very different things, so it would be a mistake for me to conflate the two of them. "Nature" is a particular way of relating to the physical and living world around us, the environment. But the two are often conflated along with other conceptions of the world around us, like "wilderness".
One can certainly make a case of capitalism as "the enemy of nature". If, say, "nature" means something we participate in, respect, see as living, as part of us, etc. -- really, a spiritual conception of the world around us -- then capitalism is antithetical. Capitalism is an economic system based on the transformation of the world into quantities, economic units, in Marxist terms, Values. A world reduced to raw material and commodities, inputs and outputs, is the opposite of a world with which we can converse, embrace, experience in a qualitative way.
But this spiritual opposition I suspect is not what is generally meant by capitalism as the enemy of nature. The implication is that capitalism will destroy not just nature, but the environment. And so the philosophical or spiritual leap to seeing the world as "nature" isn't made. The "enemy of nature" will destroy world we live in, and end life. "Nature", or the environment is left as part of a narrative that we get trapped in -- I'm thinking of Carolyn Merchant's Reinventing Eden here. In the ascensionist narrative, we are coming out of a wilderness and creating a new Eden -- this I suppose might be the capitalist narrative, where Eden is associated with the maximization of commodity production and profit. The declensionist narrative sees us falling still, from a primeval Paradise into an industrial wasteland, and we must act to stop the fall and restore Eden. Or something like that. Merchant saw these narratives as trapping us into narrow binaries and linear plots, false and/or constrained choices as it were. She proposes the alternative of complexity and dynamism, of multiple voices and partnership with the environment -- a way of reaching nature?
Well I have digressed. I think the environmental movement runs a risk in posing capitalism as the enemy of the environment. because as capitalism adjusts itself, as it surely will, to ensure the continued conditions of its reproduction, it will create a split within the environmental movement, or exacerbate the one perhaps already there. As a class, capitalists will take the necessary steps to ensure that accommodations are made to preserve capitalism. This may mean the preservation of some habitats, not because they have intrinsic value, but because they are repositories of unique genetic sequences that can be harvested or perhaps because they can be commodified as sites of eco-tourism or perhaps they are recognized as necessary carbon sinks to allow carbon-based production elsewhere. Or polar bears as a species deserve to be protected, not because they are majestic creatures, but because they have some economic value as a public relations symbol or cartoon characters or stuff-toy. And then the movement is faced with a real Sophie's Choice of which part of the planet to abandon to extinction.
Capitalism is not the enemy of the environment, but it is the enemy of nature. Where nature is something to struggle for, to achieve and embrace.
-- jd
One can certainly make a case of capitalism as "the enemy of nature". If, say, "nature" means something we participate in, respect, see as living, as part of us, etc. -- really, a spiritual conception of the world around us -- then capitalism is antithetical. Capitalism is an economic system based on the transformation of the world into quantities, economic units, in Marxist terms, Values. A world reduced to raw material and commodities, inputs and outputs, is the opposite of a world with which we can converse, embrace, experience in a qualitative way.
But this spiritual opposition I suspect is not what is generally meant by capitalism as the enemy of nature. The implication is that capitalism will destroy not just nature, but the environment. And so the philosophical or spiritual leap to seeing the world as "nature" isn't made. The "enemy of nature" will destroy world we live in, and end life. "Nature", or the environment is left as part of a narrative that we get trapped in -- I'm thinking of Carolyn Merchant's Reinventing Eden here. In the ascensionist narrative, we are coming out of a wilderness and creating a new Eden -- this I suppose might be the capitalist narrative, where Eden is associated with the maximization of commodity production and profit. The declensionist narrative sees us falling still, from a primeval Paradise into an industrial wasteland, and we must act to stop the fall and restore Eden. Or something like that. Merchant saw these narratives as trapping us into narrow binaries and linear plots, false and/or constrained choices as it were. She proposes the alternative of complexity and dynamism, of multiple voices and partnership with the environment -- a way of reaching nature?
Well I have digressed. I think the environmental movement runs a risk in posing capitalism as the enemy of the environment. because as capitalism adjusts itself, as it surely will, to ensure the continued conditions of its reproduction, it will create a split within the environmental movement, or exacerbate the one perhaps already there. As a class, capitalists will take the necessary steps to ensure that accommodations are made to preserve capitalism. This may mean the preservation of some habitats, not because they have intrinsic value, but because they are repositories of unique genetic sequences that can be harvested or perhaps because they can be commodified as sites of eco-tourism or perhaps they are recognized as necessary carbon sinks to allow carbon-based production elsewhere. Or polar bears as a species deserve to be protected, not because they are majestic creatures, but because they have some economic value as a public relations symbol or cartoon characters or stuff-toy. And then the movement is faced with a real Sophie's Choice of which part of the planet to abandon to extinction.
Capitalism is not the enemy of the environment, but it is the enemy of nature. Where nature is something to struggle for, to achieve and embrace.
-- jd
Monday, March 12, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
Green capitalism
"Green capitalism" describes a kind of shift in capitalist thinking, a somewhat forward-thinking by a sector of capitalists about the limits of environmental destruction. The environment is a part of the conditions of production. Production, and hence the expropriation of surplus value cannot take place without an environment that can provide the wherewithal for production to take place, whether that is clean air, clean water, dry land, or relatively stable weather.
The recent push by some major corporations to manage the solutions to climate change indicates this broader awareness. The rhetoric is couched in terms of "saving the planet", but I think deep-down the apparent change of heart has more to do with the problem of continuing to make money under changing objective conditions.
Well it's more complicated than that certainly -- the real possibility of some sort of social rebellion around environmental destruction, could force political changes before the full force of, say, climate change, hits business. So business is attempting to get ahead of the wave, and manage it somehow. Hence a renewed interest in Kyoto-like non-solutions like cap-and-trade markets and interest in renewable fuels like ethanol that is creating havoc within agricultural markets. Anything but, heaven forbid, consider cutting consumption.
Anyway, there is a section of the environmental movement more than happy to sidle up next to this green wing of capitalism -- they never saw anything inherent in capitalism that eats away and destroys a healthy relationship with nature (and by this I mean one that sees nature as more than a machine to be tinkered with).
This accommodation came to light last week in the deal struck by the Environmental Defense (formerly Environmental Defense Fund) and National Resources Defense Council that blessed the buyout of the controversial utility TXU by the firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The two environmental groups are highlighting how they extracted support from the utility for climate change legislation and to cancel planned coal-fired power plants. As David Wessel wrote in a March 1 Wall Street Journal column, it's a "business-friendly, market-loving strain of environmentalism". But Saturday's WSJ reported that the two organizations had been "snookered" by the utility, that the so-called concessions had been planned anyway, and that big loopholes in the terms of the agreement would allow the utility to proceed with the scrapped coal-fired plants anyway. (See "Environmentalist Groups Feud Over Terms of the TXU Buyout", p. A1
As Saturday's article notes, "[I]t can be difficult to determine who is empowered to speak for the environmental movement." But as last week's deal indicates, the idea of an "environmental movement" is a fuzzy, ill-formed one at best. As green capitalism matures, which it is quickly doing, the "movement" as such will need to come to terms, in a much deeper way than has been necessary up till now, on how it wants to relate to capitalism, what capitalism needs, and what environmentalists want. What kind of world.
jd
The recent push by some major corporations to manage the solutions to climate change indicates this broader awareness. The rhetoric is couched in terms of "saving the planet", but I think deep-down the apparent change of heart has more to do with the problem of continuing to make money under changing objective conditions.
Well it's more complicated than that certainly -- the real possibility of some sort of social rebellion around environmental destruction, could force political changes before the full force of, say, climate change, hits business. So business is attempting to get ahead of the wave, and manage it somehow. Hence a renewed interest in Kyoto-like non-solutions like cap-and-trade markets and interest in renewable fuels like ethanol that is creating havoc within agricultural markets. Anything but, heaven forbid, consider cutting consumption.
Anyway, there is a section of the environmental movement more than happy to sidle up next to this green wing of capitalism -- they never saw anything inherent in capitalism that eats away and destroys a healthy relationship with nature (and by this I mean one that sees nature as more than a machine to be tinkered with).
This accommodation came to light last week in the deal struck by the Environmental Defense (formerly Environmental Defense Fund) and National Resources Defense Council that blessed the buyout of the controversial utility TXU by the firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The two environmental groups are highlighting how they extracted support from the utility for climate change legislation and to cancel planned coal-fired power plants. As David Wessel wrote in a March 1 Wall Street Journal column, it's a "business-friendly, market-loving strain of environmentalism". But Saturday's WSJ reported that the two organizations had been "snookered" by the utility, that the so-called concessions had been planned anyway, and that big loopholes in the terms of the agreement would allow the utility to proceed with the scrapped coal-fired plants anyway. (See "Environmentalist Groups Feud Over Terms of the TXU Buyout", p. A1
As Saturday's article notes, "[I]t can be difficult to determine who is empowered to speak for the environmental movement." But as last week's deal indicates, the idea of an "environmental movement" is a fuzzy, ill-formed one at best. As green capitalism matures, which it is quickly doing, the "movement" as such will need to come to terms, in a much deeper way than has been necessary up till now, on how it wants to relate to capitalism, what capitalism needs, and what environmentalists want. What kind of world.
jd
Saturday, February 24, 2007
KFC
Here's some YouTube video of the frolicking rats at the Greenwich Village KFC:
Frolicking rat video
Why am I fascinated by this? Maybe it is the element of insurgent nature, the way that nature asserts itself, always ready to reclaim the city. And there it is on display, through the plate glass window. Not a zoo of captured and subdued exotica, but wily rodent mardi gras, in full view.
jd
Frolicking rat video
Why am I fascinated by this? Maybe it is the element of insurgent nature, the way that nature asserts itself, always ready to reclaim the city. And there it is on display, through the plate glass window. Not a zoo of captured and subdued exotica, but wily rodent mardi gras, in full view.
jd
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Evolution of consciousness bits
Some evolution of consciousness bits:
-- Silly me. I finished a fairly long project, Globalization, Romanticism and Owen Barfield, which, among other things, is a look at globalization in the context of Owen Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness. And thinking oh what novelty, only to find out that over the past thirty years plus there has been quite a lot of work done on the evolution of consciousness -- Jean Gebser, Erich Neumann, Ken Wilber, William Irwin Thompson are some key names. From what I have read since then, I don't think Gebser, Neumann, Wilber or Thompson brought/bring the same perspective or feel for the topic that Barfield did.
-- William Irwin Thompson has sympathetic instructions on how to read Rudolf Steiner in his book Coming Into Being (St. Martin's Press, 1996). Literalism is a kind of death. Steiner repeatedly emphasized the difficulty of putting his experiences into images and words in order to communicate them. One must of course not make the mistake of then taking Thompson's translation of Steiner's evolution ideas too literally either. The main point I think is that Steiner's material must be approached not rigidly and literally but flexibly and with an open mind -- poetically, imaginatively.
-- I did a paper/article several months back on using Goethe's scientific approach (shaped via an exercise that Rudolf Steiner described) to investigate human artifacts (paper is Talking with history: Using Goethe's scientific approach with human artifacts). Mainly I was fascinated with all of the connections that come together in a simple artifact, and at so many levels -- physical, social, economic, historical, creative, which all taken together amounts to a spiritual experience.
And now I am reading Gary Lachman's book A Secret History of Consciousness (Lindisfarne Books, 2003), a very readable overview of work by different people (including Steiner, Barfield and Gebser). Lachman describes an experience that P. D. Ouspensky had:
Silly me.
-- Jean Gebser, in his The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio University Press, 1985), breaks the evolution of consciousness into three broad periods: before perspective ("unperspectival"), perspective or "perspectival", and post-perspective or "aperspectival", a period we are entering now (and have been for a several decades). So the discovery of perspective in the period from the 13th to the 16th centuries, which also corresponds to the beginning of Scientific Revolution, and a general shift in the way that people, in Europe at least, viewed the world. The discovery of space, the space between things, the separation of things and in particular the viewer and the viewed were all part of this shift.
The word "network", in the Oxford English Dictionary, has one of its earliest usages in connection to the making of lace. I am not sure what to make of that. Seeing networks required stepping-back from the world, abstracting it into nodes, "sectoring" it as Gebser might say. But I also think there is something new, perhaps "aperspectival" (not sure -- haven't gotten that far in the book!) in thinking about networks today. Perhaps the new thing happens when the network isn't see as just a map of nodes and links, but as a process of interactions.
-- Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is a good read. I don't know that the basic good vs. evil thing holds up well when he tries to put it in the context of world history, and there is a certain endlessness to a struggle that seems to go nowhere. But I did like the basic thread that runs through it that those idle thoughts, the under-the-breath curses when cut-off or done wrong in the parking lot are actual, real curses that affect both the recipient and the world. A cautionary tale to promote right-thinking...
jd
-- Silly me. I finished a fairly long project, Globalization, Romanticism and Owen Barfield, which, among other things, is a look at globalization in the context of Owen Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness. And thinking oh what novelty, only to find out that over the past thirty years plus there has been quite a lot of work done on the evolution of consciousness -- Jean Gebser, Erich Neumann, Ken Wilber, William Irwin Thompson are some key names. From what I have read since then, I don't think Gebser, Neumann, Wilber or Thompson brought/bring the same perspective or feel for the topic that Barfield did.
-- William Irwin Thompson has sympathetic instructions on how to read Rudolf Steiner in his book Coming Into Being (St. Martin's Press, 1996). Literalism is a kind of death. Steiner repeatedly emphasized the difficulty of putting his experiences into images and words in order to communicate them. One must of course not make the mistake of then taking Thompson's translation of Steiner's evolution ideas too literally either. The main point I think is that Steiner's material must be approached not rigidly and literally but flexibly and with an open mind -- poetically, imaginatively.
-- I did a paper/article several months back on using Goethe's scientific approach (shaped via an exercise that Rudolf Steiner described) to investigate human artifacts (paper is Talking with history: Using Goethe's scientific approach with human artifacts). Mainly I was fascinated with all of the connections that come together in a simple artifact, and at so many levels -- physical, social, economic, historical, creative, which all taken together amounts to a spiritual experience.
And now I am reading Gary Lachman's book A Secret History of Consciousness (Lindisfarne Books, 2003), a very readable overview of work by different people (including Steiner, Barfield and Gebser). Lachman describes an experience that P. D. Ouspensky had:
During his experiments, he took a break on his sofa, smoking a cigarette. Flicking the ash, he looked with wonder at his ashtray. Suddenly he saw this humble object as the center of a vast radiating web of meanings and relations. In a rush of recognition, everything to do with the ashtray flooded his consciousness. Who had made it, its use the material from which it was made, the history of tobacco, the whole long development of humankind's ability to mold its environment. Fire, flame, and the match he had just struck: each seemed a hitherto unopened window on the world, through which he now looked with wonder and amazement. (p 44)
Silly me.
-- Jean Gebser, in his The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio University Press, 1985), breaks the evolution of consciousness into three broad periods: before perspective ("unperspectival"), perspective or "perspectival", and post-perspective or "aperspectival", a period we are entering now (and have been for a several decades). So the discovery of perspective in the period from the 13th to the 16th centuries, which also corresponds to the beginning of Scientific Revolution, and a general shift in the way that people, in Europe at least, viewed the world. The discovery of space, the space between things, the separation of things and in particular the viewer and the viewed were all part of this shift.
It was around this time that lace was first introduced; and here we see that even the fabric could no longer serve merely as a surface, but had to be broken open, as it were, to reveal the visibility of the background or substratum. (p 22)
The word "network", in the Oxford English Dictionary, has one of its earliest usages in connection to the making of lace. I am not sure what to make of that. Seeing networks required stepping-back from the world, abstracting it into nodes, "sectoring" it as Gebser might say. But I also think there is something new, perhaps "aperspectival" (not sure -- haven't gotten that far in the book!) in thinking about networks today. Perhaps the new thing happens when the network isn't see as just a map of nodes and links, but as a process of interactions.
-- Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is a good read. I don't know that the basic good vs. evil thing holds up well when he tries to put it in the context of world history, and there is a certain endlessness to a struggle that seems to go nowhere. But I did like the basic thread that runs through it that those idle thoughts, the under-the-breath curses when cut-off or done wrong in the parking lot are actual, real curses that affect both the recipient and the world. A cautionary tale to promote right-thinking...
jd
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